Mists of Pandaria Beta Launcher Updated
The launcher received yet another graphical update tonight, making it the third version so far.

Brewfest Delayed One Week

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

We are aware that many of you are concerned about not having enough time to level up and such, which is a concern we fully acknowledge, as we know that many of you would like to enjoy and experience the new areas and content at your own pace, and not feel like you have to rush through things and level up as fast as possible just to have a go at the Brewfest dungeon boss.

Therefore, In order to make sure you guys have some more time to prepare for this year's Brewfest, we have pushed the whole event forward by just over a week, stopping short of overlapping with the Hallow’s End event.

Horde Pandaria Introduction Quest Line
The latest beta patch updated the Horde introduction yet again and reopened Jade Forest, now with a new starting quest line for the Horde and Alliance, as well as new and reworked quests throughout the zone. Today we are taking a look at the first few quests in the new Horde Introduction.

Rather than quoting several additional questions and issues, we'll just do a lightning round of out of context replies. As always, just because I did not respond directly to an issue does NOT mean that it is being ignored. Please try to be reasonable about the "I'm going to keep posting until I get an answer" posts. Those never end well.

- Hurricane being stronger than Astral Storm is intended.
- Blacksmithing having a stronger profession perk is something we’re investigating.
- We’re investigating some bugs on Tranquility and Wild Growth under extreme haste (e.g. Soul of the Forest).
- Eternal Flame being on the GCD for Protection is unintended. The hot not benefitting from mastery is intended, or that talent might feel mandatory for Prot.
- Battle Healer costing mana is a bug.
- Force of Nature should scale with your crit and haste.

We're just not seeing healing priests falling behind on HPM or HPS in the current raid or challenge mode testing. I don't want to dismiss the concerns though, and we will keep an eye on it. Lack of "raid utility" is a very slippery beast. In my experience, healers always think their particular character lacks it. We believe however that all of the healers will continue to see plenty of PvE use, as they did in Cataclysm, and we want to get more of them competitive in PvP.

Warlocks, we want to mention that one thing inflating Demonology on beta currently is a bug with Decimation, which is making it trigger from Shadow Bolts on targets at any health % a majority of the time. That’s going to significantly influence target dummy comparisons. That’ll be fixed in the next build. (This isn’t to say that Demonology isn’t higher than Affliction/Destruction, but it's a discrepancy worth noting.)

Druid (Forums)Is it intended that Bonus Armor is affected by Guardian Mastery? For example the Mantid Elixir which provides +2250 Armor is multiplied by the Guardian Mastery for a bonus of 2475 armor (before gear and buffs).
Yes, this is intended. Guardian Mastery should be a final multiplier on all armor.

Bloom's nerf now puts its mastery buffed healing per Shroom at 9.25k (LvL 90, full PvP gear, no gems/enchants/buffs).

For a 25man that number is somewhat acceptable if you manage to heal 10+ people with all 3 Shrooms for a total of only 277.5k healing done (without DR or AoE cap). After at least 3 GCDs of set up that just does not make it that attractive of a spell.
Bloom is not intended to be worth using rotationally. It should be worth planting the ‘Shooms when you have downtime, or lulls in healing requirements, and then Bloom them later on when you need burst healing (since Bloom is off the GCD). The numbers do appear off a bit for that design so we will adjust.

Hunter (Forums)One concern about the latest changes to marksmanship hunters- the new mastery proc rate seems problematic to me. If I'm doing the math correctly, this puts a 7200 mastery rating hard cap on MM hunters, since that seems to be the amount of mastery rating at which you have a 100% proc rate on wild quiver.
A valid concern. Mastery being capped is not something we were intending with that change, and so are going to bring mastery back to 2% chance to trigger Wild Quiver per point, and double Wild Quiver’s damage back to 100% weapon damage (normalized).

Paladin (Forums)Sanctity of Battle and Spell Haste
The intent is that Sanctity of Battle is based on melee haste instead of spell haste but we are waiting on a code change for that.

Shaman (Forums)Purification + Water Totem Healing
It should work as the tooltip of Purification says; it not working is just a bug, and is fixed for the next build.

Warlock (Forums)Haste scaling was nerfed significantly through this.
- Under the old model, the scaling of the extra dots was linear with the scaling of haste on additional dot ticks during the duration. In other words, as I go from six to seven ticks of my corruption, for a full MG channel I go from 12, to 14 ticks total.
- Under the new model, as I go from 9 to 10 ticks on my corruption, malefic grasp isn't giving me any extra ticks on the MG channel, and I'm therefore not getting any extra ticks on corruption. I do realize MG will eventually gain another tick, but not nearly as fast as my dots will...in other words the linear scaling will no longer apply.
With the new form of MG, it does indeed smooth out haste’s breakpoints. But that doesn’t mean that haste as a whole is worse, just that you don’t care as much about specific breakpoints of haste. MG ticks will accelerate with haste just as fast as DoT ticks will.

The spec is now bound to MG's ticks rather than MG's channel. - Under the new model, the haste effect of the Dot is tied to a discreet amount of MG channeling, i.e. 1 second. .9 secs of channeling gives me nothing. 1.9 secs of channeling isn't any better than 1 second of channeling. This brings latency and the need to move into the spec in a way that's hugely detrimental to a huge chunk of our damage. The old MG didn't have this issue, every instant spent channeling was beneficial to our DPS. This is hard to model in a simulation and easy to ignore, but this will matter and makes the spec significantly harder to manage for the average player. It's true that not waiting for a tick of MG before "hurt" your dps, but the effect was miniscule compared to the effect under the new design.
This is the problem we were trying to solve with the change to MG: What you describe here is how you thought it worked, but it didn’t actually work that way. The precise timing of which MG was applied and when it faded was actually very important, in very unintuitive ways. You would expect that if you had 71.3% MG uptime (just making up a number), you would get 71.3% more DoT ticks (and I believe were simulating it something like that). You wouldn’t. You’d actually get somewhere between 50% and 90% more DoT ticks, depending upon where the MG applications/fades lined up with natural DoT ticks.

We liked the design of MG before, but it was something our combat engine was just going to struggle with. We didn't want it to feel buggy. We hope the new form of MG is more reliable. When it ticks, you get an extra tick.

The community simulation results of this new build that I’ve seen so far are showing Affliction and Destruction very close (and we hope to make them even closer before release), with Demonology significantly ahead. We’re also seeing that internally, though not quite as extreme. We’re investigating that, to see what discrepancy there is there, and how much of an adjustment is in order.

Also, for anyone, note that if you feel your damage is lacking, please let us know in what situations and compared to whom. It's not sufficient to say "my damage felt fine before and I don't like being nerfed." Nobody likes being nerfed, and stating that doesn't give us much to go on.

Affliction's best stat is now mastery, by far, with haste being down where crit is, but our dark soul grants haste. Point for point we gain the least from our dark soul. Now the numbers are very okay at the moment, so it would be iffy to cause Dark Soul to grant the "highest" stat rather than the stat favored by the spec that you decide on, it just really bothers me that our main cd is worth (stat weights included) 33% less than the other two.
We’d like to hear more about why SimulationCraft (or any other community theorycraft) is seeing haste drop in value due to this patch. With the same amount of haste, you should see the same number of ticks of each DoT, before and after this last patch, after accounting for the reduced period on UA and Corr. It’s possible that we’re missing something.The tooltip for Nightfall says that it's now a 5% chance instead of the previous 10% chance. Since Nightfall was actually a stacking 2% chance, is there any change to it's internal mechanics? Do extra ticks caused by Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul cause Nightfall procs? Finally, is the Soul Shard generation component of Soul Harvest actually removed, or was it just moved off of the tooltip?

edit: Also, the tooltip for Malefic Grasp is a bit confusing. It says that it causes your DoTs to instantly do 50% normal periodic damage every 1 second when MG does damage. Does that instant damage count as periodic damage for related effects (Nightfall for Corruption, trinket effects related to DoT ticks, etc)? Does that instant damage happen every 1 second regardless of haste or does it happen when MG does damage?
My previous post answered most of this, but to answer the other parts… Nightfall is a 0.5% stacking proc chance now (averaging out to a 5.7% proc chance over time). That’s not intended to be a nerf to the frequency that Nightfall procs because you’re getting roughly twice as many chances per second to proc Nightfall as before.

The extra DoT ticks happen whenever MG ticks, not just every 1 sec. It still scales just as well with haste as before. These extra DoT ticks will show up differently than the regular DoT ticks in the combat log, but will have all the same benefits as the regular ones; same things it can proc, same chances, same damage (other than the 0.5x dmg multiplier from MG), everything.

Mannoroth's Fury
This is actually a rather interesting talent, because the feedback has been negative for many forum posters, yet many of the guilds in our heroic raid testing have been using Mannoroth’s Fury for most encounters because it is so strong. We’re totally open to the idea that it’s an unattractive talent and should be changed, but so far we’re only seeing the perception of that, not it actually being that.

Before a dozen Warlocks jump down my throat for telling you that Mannoroth’s Fury is awesome, I’d encourage you to check out how it’s being used in many of the raid encounters and PvP.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Active Challenge Modes?
None is currently open. We'll open up a couple more challenge modes for testing next build. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Missing Achievements?I've noticed that there is no "Cataclysm Safari" achievement, and that Cataclysm pets are not included in either the "Eastern Kingdoms Safari" or the "Kalimdor Safari" achievements.
Cataclysm pets are included in the EK and Kalimdor achievements. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Account Wide PvP Mounts
All arena mount rewards and their associated FoS are unique per character. This might be bugged in the current build though. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Transmogrification RulesI just spent quite an amount of gold for making a weapon and gemming it. I reached level 83, eagerly awaiting to transmog it to a weapon that fits my brownish warrior theme very well. But it won't allow that! This goes against the stated transmog rules...
The issue is indeed being fixed in Mists, as you said. Sorry you can't enjoy wielding it for the time being.

However, there are two schools of thought regarding class-only items. Some people really like having items that only their class can use, it makes them all the more unique, special and rare.

Legendaries Are Too Common?
So on a somewhat related topic, how do you all feel about the argument to be able to transmogrify legendaries? I assume most of you would say no to that, considering you feel legendaries should be 'rare'. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Horde and Alliance Faction Differences
Yeah, things do feel a little cosy between the Horde and Alliance at the moment. I wonder how that's going to work out... (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Priest (Forums)PW: Solace Change
Solace is intended to be a choice. Those of you saying you *have* to have a fast cast time because you *have* to spam Solace or you'll have no mana are arguing for the wrong thing, because I hope it's obvious that isn't the intent.

I know some of you are worried about your priest (and before that it was shaman and before that it was paladin and I probably missed druid in there somewhere) but we also have to rectify that with the performance and opinions of the players we see tackling the content on beta. If you want to be as helpful as possible, try to be very explicit with the situations and cases you feel your priest can't handle. The more detailed, the better. What spells are you casting? Which encounters? What feels different from Catclysm, remembering that you are no longer in end level gear? (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warlock (Forums)Beta Warlock Changes
As some of you may have noticed, there's already some notes about the latest beta build out there.
You have also a few posts (#1, #2, #3, #4) with information from development regarding warlocks and the latest changes.

Here's a short summary if you don't want to read all those threads:

The Everlasting Affliction glyph was providing a huge DPS increase, but we don’t want huge DPS increases to come from glyphs.
Instead of simply nerfing the glyph, we baked the benefits that the glyph provided into the entire class via Pandemic, a level 90 passive ability, and changed the glyph to something completely different.

Drain Soul still deals double damage under 20%. It being missing from the new tooltip is just a tooltip error and has been corrected for the next build.

The 25% nerf to most Affliction-specific abilities should amount to a ~20% nerf. This is indeed a rather extreme amount, because they really were that extremely overpowered.

The Malefic Grasp mechanic change should not be a nerf at all.

The community simulation results of this new build are showing Affliction and Destruction very close with Demonology significantly ahead. We’re also seeing that internally, though not quite as extreme. We’re investigating to see what discrepancy there is there, and how much of an adjustment is in order.

Nightfall is a 0.5% stacking proc chance now (~5.7% proc chance over time).
That’s not intended to be a nerf to the frequency that Nightfall procs because you’re getting roughly twice as many chances per second to proc Nightfall as before.

These changes come after devs realized some numbers were simply off. The game is still in beta, it is expected and completely normal for this to happen and it's usually in the latest stages of development that this kind of fine-tuning gets more attention.
While we take players feedback very seriously, it's important to understand that these changes are not a direct consequence of any complaints about warlocks being overpowered. Changes are done to the game only after getting everything thoroughly checked out and verified internally. External data helps us a lot with directing our attention to subjects that possibly otherwise we could miss or be slower at fixing, but never work as a basis for a direct change.

The discussion on this kind of threads can easily get derailed, so as always, please keep your posts on-topic and continue providing us with constructive criticism and opinions about MoP here, if possible, backed up by real data and in the case of bug reports, please clearly describe a way for us to replicate any issue you may encounter over on the bug report forum and be sure to read the guidelines before posting.

Talks about numbers. Ignores the Instant Spammable 8 second fears elephant in the room.
I understand and share your concerns with giving warlocks another instant fear, but on the other hand MoP adds and changes a lot of abilities to all the other classes, and we can't think of any new spell independently from everything else. I wouldn’t dare to claim that this is unbalanced until I actually experience it in a good testing environment, and that means playing vs all classes with players that are already experienced with all of the new MoP abilities.
You can be sure devs are paying very close attention to both the PvE and PvP side of MoP, we’re still a long time away from the final version, and there’s still enough time to change anything related to tuning.

Also, making fear instant or castable matters little for PvE, while for PvP it makes a huge difference. So you can be sure that on a spell that is clearly directed at PvP, developers will make sure it feels balanced, and they do take a lot of the feedback from the community when deciding this type of changes, so if you guys actually provide good, sensible reasons, if possible backed up by data, as to why do you think an instant fear with 10 sec cd in the environment of MoP, considering all the new variables that MoP's content brings in, every new kind of synergy that will exist between classes, etc… and after that you still think the ability is overpowered, then I’m sure you’ll get their attention and if it turns out they agree with you, I’m sure a new patch will come fixing the issue.

We're all free to speculate about how every new change in the beta affects PvP Balance, but I'd wait a bit more before jumping into conclusions about how some class will be OP in the final version, there's still a long way to go, and if you want to help us out, we really do appreciate it if you could stop by the beta feedback forum and gives us your constructive input. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Raid Testing Schedule - August 1

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

25-player Normal testing will continue on Wednesday. The testing schedule for remaining Normal modes will be somewhat accelerated, since the encounters are already familiar to many testers and we are just verifying functionality and tuning.

Each encounter should be available at approximately the listed times below for all Beta Test Realms, regardless of suggested geographical region.

As always, this testing schedule is very fluid and subject to the realities of a beta environment. We might have to change the time of a testing session or cancel it entirely, due to bugs, builds, server hardware issues, etc. Keep an eye on this forum for the latest information, and thank you in advance for testing and providing feedback.

Security Update: Dial-In Authenticators

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Please note that we have removed the Dial-in Authenticator from our Battle.net security options. If you’re currently using the Dial-in Authenticator, it will continue to work normally until August 15, 2012, at which point we’ll be removing it from any accounts that have it attached.

If you’re not already taking advantage of one of the Battle.net security measures listed below, we strongly encourage you to select the option most convenient to you:

We also offer Battle.net SMS Protect, which can be used alone or stacked with one of the options above for an even greater level of protection.

If you’re currently using the Dial-in Authenticator and want to add any of these security options before August 15, you’ll first need to remove the Dial-In Authenticator from your account by following the instructions listed here.

We’re fully committed to account security, but please keep in mind that it’s ultimately a team effort. While making use of the available security options can go a long way in helping to protect your characters and items, it’s also important to be aware of the other things you can do to help ensure your account is as secure as possible. Review our Account and Computer Security article for more information on email security, web browsing safety, critical software updates, and more.

Curse Weekly Roundup
Evan is here this week with news on the Minecraft 1.3 update, Borderlands 2 Premium package, run down on the 'Four Pillars' Guild Wars 2 videos, and some further video content on World Of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria.

There has to be a reason they are making it more and more simple. I just don't understand why they wouldn't go with the one that has all the nice details on the edges though, it's a lot nicer on the eyes and it doesn't stop you from hitting the play button. Especially after all that work of detailing it.

First launcher still looks the best, good thing we don't have to look at this for more than a few seconds.

And can anyone clarify this:

Missing Achievements?
I've noticed that there is no "Cataclysm Safari" achievement, and that Cataclysm pets are not included in either the "Eastern Kingdoms Safari" or the "Kalimdor Safari" achievements.
Cataclysm pets are included in the EK and Kalimdor achievements.

Q: Pets are not included
A: But they are

I'm confused. Did the player not pay attention or did the CM not understand the question correctly?

I still feel if you have a legendary you should be able to show it off, even if you transmog it people will still know you have the legendary. The only time a legendary is even relevant is if you are the level required or if you do the challenge mode where all your stats change to fit the dungeon. Beyond that the only place to show people that you have a legendary is if you run around a city bragging about it(which Im sure is the common way). Also what if you like the looks of the weapon over any other? Well Blizz says that the look of the weapon should stay with that particular weapon cause they dont want everybody running around with the legendary look.